AI has already changed many aspects of how the world works, but there might be even greater change in the offing.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says that “crazy things” can happen if AI can continue to progress at the pace at which it’s moved in the last few years. “If the exponential continues — again, it only has to continue for another 1-3 years — crazy things happen in terms of the model capabilities,” he said in an interview.
Amodei said that there were two camps developing in predicting how this would play out. “There’s like, well, common sense, which says that (AI progress) has to stop — it can’t go on,” he said. He said the other camp believed what if it actually does go on? “I think I am someone whose instinct has always been on the side of what if it does (go on)? I think it will. I’m not certain of that, but it’s, it’s where I’d put my bet,” he added
“And the way I think about it from the perspective of the models is, today I would say the models we have, they may be as smart as a smart undergrad in some areas. They’re able to augment what professionals do. We’ve seen that in medicine — I’ve seen lots of stories of people uploading their medical information to AI,” he added.
Amodei said that models weren’t yet able to create new knowledge, but that could change soon if AI continued on its current trajectory. “They’re not yet at the level where they’re creative enough to go beyond the frontier of human knowledge. And I think if the exponential continues for only maybe one to three more years, then we’ll start to go beyond the frontier of human knowledge and then things really go crazy,” he said.
“I think we’re gonna get to this world where AI is able to make original scientific discoveries. It’s able to work with humans to make those discoveries. A very small number of humans will be able to work with massive AI agents to build new companies and new types of economic activity,” he added.
Amodei said that while AI’s progress thus far was already impressive, it was still growing exponentially. As such, if this rate of progress continued only for a few more years, AI would be unrecognizable from what it is today. This AI would be able to surpass the best humans in most fields, and be able to work independently on complex tasks. And that’s where things might get crazy — there’s no telling what changes unleashing such amounts of intelligence into the world could bring.